


Teen Angel

by ivyfic



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode: s02e02 The Intruder, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-23
Updated: 2006-02-23
Packaged: 2017-10-16 21:43:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/169649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyfic/pseuds/ivyfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney wasn't always a geek.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Teen Angel

**Author's Note:**

> To accompany [this secret.](http://community.livejournal.com/sga_post_secret/44808.html#cutid1) Takes place shortly before 2.02 Intruder. I only meant this to be 200 words, honest! What can I say - not even I can get McKay to shut up.

Despite being gone for a year, Rodney’s apartment looked like he had just left it that morning. John decided that was because of the clutter. It took a special type of person to leave for another galaxy with half his closet draped over the floor and furniture. Well, Rodney probably hadn’t figured he’d be bringing a guest when he came back.

Rodney had picked up his cat on the way up to the apartment. Now he headed straight for the kitchen and her food bowl, cooing over her in what John thought was a very unmanly way, though he would never say so to Rodney.

John took the opportunity to snoop around a little. He drifted into the library – probably considered a second bedroom by the realtor. The wall next to the door was empty, but dotted with nails. This must have been the original location of Rodney’s wall of self-congratulation: the diplomas and framed awards that now hung in Atlantis. He skimmed over the bookshelves, his eyes flicking past volumes on advanced math and stacks of back issues of _Journal of Physics G_ and _Journal of High Energy Physics_.

At the end of the shelf, his eyes stopped on a brown volume with gold foil lettering on the spine: _Lakeshore High School 1983_. Oh, this was going to be fun. John couldn’t suppress a wicked grin as he brought the book into the living room.

Rodney was still in the kitchen, crouching to pet his cat. John bounced onto the couch and ostentatiously opened the yearbook. With any luck, Rodney would turn around just as John found the most embarrassing photo of Rodney in the book – math club, or most likely to provoke justified manslaughter.

He flipped through the club and sports photos at the beginning of the book, and straight to the listing of seniors, six to a page, at the back.

“Hey,” Rodney said, turning back into the living room, his cat still hunkered over her food. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” John replied innocently. He flipped through the pages – Lindsey, Long, MacKenzie, Marks…

Rodney approached the couch. “John,” he drew the name out low and threatening, and John wondered if Rodney would snatch the book away.

And then he found it – McKay, Rodney.

John had assumed a lot of things about Rodney: the teenage years, and this photo conformed with absolutely none of them. Rodney glared at the camera through lowered lashes, tendrils of hair draping messily over his forehead. His face was more angular, the cheeks hollowed and showing the first hint of stubble. He was wearing a leather jacket and – dear God – an _earring_.

Rodney McKay was a hunk.

John stared disbelievingly at the photo, then up at the slightly pudgy, slightly balding, definitely geeky physicist in front of him. “Wow,” John said, then looked back at the yearbook photo. “You used to be _hot_.”

Silence stretched for several moments, and John looked back up at Rodney. When Rodney had walked into the living room, he’d looked slightly embarrassed, but mostly pleased that John had agreed to spend his leave at chez McKay.

Now he looked pissed. Really, really pissed. John mentally rewound the last few moments in his head. Oh, shit.

“ _Used to be?_ ” Rodney accused, his voice pinched. Amiable to rip-roaring mad in three little words.

Shit, shit, shit.

“That’s not what I meant,” John backpedaled frantically. “Of course you’re still hot. You’re just more of the cute, adorable, cuddly kind of hot.”

Rodney’s face got even redder. John stared at the ceiling, mentally kicking himself. Cuddly?

“I mean – well, you’re a geek! I just thought in high school you’d be all plaid and pocket protector and suspenders, you know! But,” John gestured with the book he was still holding, “you were a … a teen heart throb!”

Rodney’s glare was screaming _death, death, death_ at John. John stood from the couch and took a step towards Rodney, who backed out of reach, his arms crossed threateningly over his chest. John saw his pleasant daydreams about the next few days go swirling down the toilet.

“Well,” Rodney said, tilting his head scornfully, “since I _used to be_ so hot, I’ll just leave you with the yearbook, then. Would you like me to sign it for you? Then you could tape it to the ceiling over your bed and stare at it dreamily and wonder how the hell a _teen heart throb_ turned into a _cuddly geek_.”

If they’d been on Atlantis, Rodney probably would have stormed out then, but they were in Rodney’s apartment and he didn’t really have any place to storm to. At least John hadn’t pissed him off quite enough to get thrown out, but he was guessing that was a near thing. He looked at Rodney’s red face again, a vein now throbbing across his forehead. A very near thing.

Rodney turned and stomped into his bedroom. He slammed the door, then John heard the thump of McKay hitting the bed.

Stupid, stupid, John thought, looking imploringly at the ceiling. He slouched back onto the couch and hit himself in the head with the closed yearbook.

*

A half an hour later, Rodney still hadn’t left the bedroom. He’d opened the door briefly when his cat started scratching at it, but slammed it again in John’s face. This was getting ridiculous. Rodney hadn’t gone into a snit like this since John had fiddled with an innocuous Ancient doohickey in Rodney’s lab, causing it to send out a limited-range EMP that fried both Rodney’s and Zelenka’s hard drives. Rodney’s hard drive had been backed up in three places and it took all of fifteen minutes to restore the data – plus the doohickey showed promise as an anti-Genii weapon – but John had still been banned from the lab for weeks.

It was unfair, really. Rodney had said things far more insulting to John and John had never locked himself in the bedroom. In this relationship, Rodney was the one who was supposed to stick his foot in his mouth.

Clearly this called for some serious groveling.

John went over to McKay’s bag, still next to the door, and pulled out the laptop. He booted it, easily bypassed the login menu (password: einsteinjr) and was pleased to find he could pick up a wifi signal.

For his fifteenth high school reunion, the class secretary had put together a website – she’d made a fortune in the dot com boom and was eager to share her “expertise.” With a quick search, John found the website (Polk High School class of ’85 in bubbly pink lettering across the top, surrounded by animated confetti). There was an email listserve, contact info, and, most importantly, photos of each and every one of them, scanned in from the yearbook. He clicked on his own page and up popped what John considered the most unflattering photo that had ever been taken of him. Ever.

John hadn’t gone to his reunion, so didn’t have an opportunity to ask Lisa to take the damn thing down. His contact info at the bottom was mostly blank, listing his address only as: USAF – Active Duty. Back in 2000, he’d been in Afghanistan.

John cradled the open laptop and walked over to the shut bedroom door. He didn’t know if it was possible for doors to glare, but this one seemed to be doing just that. He knocked.

Silence.

“Rodney, you can’t stay in there all week. All the food’s out here with me,” John called through the door.

He heard the soft mewl of a cat being unseated, then Rodney’s padded shuffle. The door opened and Rodney glared at him. “You promised something about food?” he asked.

Before Rodney could shut the door again, John thrust the computer into his hands. “What have you done to my laptop?” he asked. Then he looked at the screen.

The corners of Rodney’s mouth turned up in a malicious grin, then he let out a snuffling laugh. He backed away from the door, laughing whole-heartedly now. He squinted at John through tearing eyes, then back at the screen. By the time Rodney sat back on the bed, he was sniffling.

“OK, you can stop laughing now,” John said, sitting next to Rodney.

Rodney cleared his throat and tried to swallow the laughter. “You had a mullet?” he forced out, the last word breaking up into gales of laughter as Rodney lost his battle with self-control.

“Yes, yes, the teenage years were so very pleasant, let’s make John remember them in vivid detail.”

“But – mullet!”

“It was the eighties!”

It wasn’t the mullet that was so bad, by itself. It _was_ the eighties, after all. Most days he gelled his hair up, affecting a gawky Patrick Swayze mystique. John hadn’t stopped growing until sophomore year in college, so in high school his head was still too big for his body, and his smile too big for everything else.

His senior year, unfortunately, he’d let his mother know when school photo day was. So instead of wearing his white-washed jean jacket, he’d been forced to wear a collared shirt and tie. But worst of all – his mother had made him slick his hair down, trying to tame what she considered a hideous haircut into something that Cary Grant would have found acceptable. John’s hair had never behaved. Trying to gel it down made him look like Alfalfa instead.

And to top off the whole horrendous affair, he’d woken up that morning to find an enormous zit right in the middle of his forehead, glaring angry red like a bindi.

John looked contemplatively at his photo, then at Rodney’s photo in the yearbook he had brought with him. “You know, if you showed these to one of the Marines in Atlantis, they’d think we swapped them.”

“Foot, mouth, John. You’re not improving things.” Rodney tried to glare at John, but was still giggling to himself. John decided the humiliation was worth it; at least Rodney was talking to him again.

Rodney looked back at the computer screen. “I bet you had all the girls asking you out to the Sadie Hawkins,” he said sarcastically.

“Actually, I did.” Rodney looked at him disbelievingly. “I was on the track team. And believe me, I looked a lot cooler every other day of senior year. I saved up all my awkwardness for this one photo, got it all out of the way in one immortal moment.”

Rodney hummed, the laughter finally petering out.

“What about you?” John asked, opening the yearbook between them. “You can’t tell me the chicks didn’t fall all over you.”

“Ah – well, no,” Rodney said soberly.

“But – the earring! And the studly stubble!”

“That was a week’s growth. And the earring was just to piss off the parents. They never commented, though.”

John tilted his head inquiringly at Rodney, caught be the seriousness of his tone.

Rodney pulled the yearbook towards himself. “I did not have chicks ‘falling all over me’ because of _that_ ,” he said, jabbing at the photo next to his.

John looked: Jeannie McKay. While Rodney glared menacingly in his photo, Jeannie tilted her head coyly, grinning for all she was worth at the photographer. An explosion of crimped blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders, pulled into a slightly off-center half-ponytail by an aqua scrunchy. But John could immediately see the similarities – the jagged mouth, the bushy eyebrows.

“I skipped three grades and landed in hers,” Rodney said, leaning back on his elbows.

“Let me guess – she wasn’t happy?”

“Oh, no. She had her horde of minions telling the whole school that I wet the bed until I was four and I still slept with a security blanket and a night light.”

“Did you?” John asked.

“No!” Rodney smacked him in the arm. He looked off at the far wall thoughtfully. “I managed to convince them pretty quickly that I was a psychotic asshole, though. They left me alone after that.”

“I see that runs in the family, then,” John said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Anyway,” Rodney said, sitting back up. “Next fall I was off to U Toronto, so…” He shrugged.

Rodney picked up the yearbook from John’s lap and tossed it onto a chair, where it rested askance on a pile of shirts. He grabbed the laptop to set it on the dresser, but stopped for a moment, staring at the screen.

“You think you would have liked me in high school?” John asked, lounging back on the bed. Rodney’s cat jumped back up onto the comforter, and John stroked her idly.

“Well that depends on whether you were as incompetent as the rest of the sheep.”

“Mensa, remember?” The cat settled into the warm space Rodney had left.

Rodney looked at him, his eyes burrowing into John. “And you of course never played stupid so you wouldn’t blow the curve.”

John held up his palms. “You caught me.”

“I knew it,” Rodney scoffed.

“But – I did the extra credit after class to make up the grade.”

“When nobody could see you were smart.” Rodney gently pushed his cat onto the floor.

“Exactly. The math extra credits were pretty easy – the answer was always 0, 1, or 1985.”

Rodney set the laptop down, and lay down next to John. “Or _i_.”

“Or pi,” John added. They lay for a moment in silence, staring up at Rodney’s ceiling

“What do you call a baby eigen-sheep?” Rodney asked quickly.

John rolled his head towards Rodney and grinned. He’d heard that one from his multi-variable teacher in college. “Lamb,” John said, then paused. “ _Duh_.”

Rodney groaned, then frowned appraisingly. “I guess I would have tolerated you.”

“Good,” John said. He breathed deeply, just enjoying for a moment being safe, on Earth, next to his best friend. “Good.”  



End file.
